Sales and solutions teams at retail and food‑tech platforms often see promising deals slow down when conversations shift to integrations, data migration, and onboarding. Prospects worry about risk, timelines, and internal effort, which can stall even the strongest commercial fit.

Why integrations slow deals

Most buyers operate complex stacks across POS, ERP, accounting, marketplaces, delivery partners, and marketing tools. When a new platform is introduced, they immediately ask: “How will this work with everything we already use?” Long integration projects, manual migrations, and inconsistent data flows make it hard for champions to push deals through.

A better approach is to treat integrations and migrations as a product, not a project, something standardized, repeatable, and clearly communicated in every sales cycle. Framing integration as a defined motion also makes it easier to align with the kind of automated onboarding and migration journeys described on LINK’s migration page.

What a modern integration layer looks like

A robust integration and migration layer typically includes:

• Pre-built connectors for common systems in retail and food-tech, with the flexibility to customize fields, mappings, and logic as merchant needs evolve. This mirrors how many modern integration portfolios expose connectors across POS, ERP, accounting, and marketplaces, similar to what is highlighted in LINK’s integrations section.
• Automated historical data migration and ongoing sync, so merchants are not starting from scratch. A well-designed migration engine can move data for locations, orders, inventory, catalogs, and customers before go-live, and then keep everything up to date in the background.
• Embeddable, white-label flows that live inside your own product, giving a native onboarding experience and reducing security concerns. This lets merchants trigger migrations and integrations directly from your dashboard.

With this kind of foundation, sales and solutions teams can promise realistic timelines, support multi‑location rollouts, and scale merchant onboarding without overloading engineering. It also becomes much easier to standardize playbooks and SLAs across regions and verticals.

Making this a competitive advantage

When integration is positioned as a known, low‑risk motion – with clear pricing, implementation playbooks, and case‑study proof – it becomes a reason to choose your platform, not a reason to delay. Sharing real‑world stories of complex POS or ERP integrations, multi‑outlet retail rollouts, or restaurant migrations helps buyers see that their edge cases have already been solved. Packaging integrations and migrations with transparent, usage‑based or volume‑based pricing can make approvals smoother. Instead of bespoke one‑off quotes each time, sales teams can reference standard tiers and options.

If you want to turn integration and onboarding into a consistent competitive advantage for your retail or food‑tech platform, explore how a dedicated integration and migration layer can support your GTM and product teams. To see how this works in practice and what it could look like for your stack, review LinkToAny’s case studies, explore how automated migrations are handled, learn more about the integrations portfolio.

You can request a demo from LinkToAny at https://linktoany.com/demo-request-linktoany/ or message our team at sales@linktoany.com

But what happens when a brand has been set up on Omni and realizes Core is actually the better fit? For Cin7 partners managing multiple clients, this kind of migration can become a drain on resources and can waste valuable client time.

That changes with LinkToAny

LinkToAny now offers a fully automated migration path from Cin7 Omni to Cin7 Core, purpose-built to empower Cin7 partners to move their customers and brands to the platform that serves them best — quickly, accurately, and without the manual headaches.

No CSV files. No manual data mapping. No copy-paste marathons. No guesswork. Just a clean, structured, end-to-end migration that preserves your data integrity and gets the brands operational on Core fast.

The real complexity and work lies in mapping the structural differences between two systems. LinkToAny’s AI-led mapping handles this automatically and covers GL Account mapping, Price Tier mapping, Tax mapping, Location mapping, and Payment mapping.

The migration flow covers the full spectrum of business-critical datasets, including Customer, Products & Variants, Suppliers, Sales, and Inventory. This migration capability is a game-changer for Cin7 partners and their customers/brands, helping them move to the inventory management system that serves them best!

How It Works

Connect — Link your client’s Cin7 Omni and Cin7 Core accounts to LinkToAny.

Map — Review and confirm the automated mapping of GL accounts, price tiers, taxes, locations, and payments. Adjust where needed.

Migrate — Launch the migration and let LinkToAny transfer customers, products, suppliers, sales, and inventory data.

Validate — Review the migration results with built-in reporting to confirm everything has landed correctly.

Go Live — Your client is up and running on Cin7 Core.

The best technology decisions should be based on ‘what’s right for the business’ — not on how difficult it would be to switch. With LinkToAny’s automated Cin7 Omni to Core migration, the switching cost is no longer a barrier. Ready to migrate your clients from Cin7 Omni to Cin7 Core? Fill out the Get a Demo form or email us at sales@linktoany.com

Attending Money 20/20 Las Vegas this year validated an important hypothesis: onboarding remains one of the greatest challenges for fintech, especially within the payments and B2B space. The event brought together a vibrant mix of founders, investors, product leads, and innovators, all united by a shared goal to enhance fintech workflows and customer experience.

Fintech Onboarding: The Hidden Bottleneck

The conference reconfirmed that inefficient onboarding workflows are still a significant pain point for major payment platforms. Despite massive growth and scale, many platforms onboarding thousands of merchants still wrestle with complex, manual migration processes that slow down go-lives and frustrate customers. Through deep-dive conversations and follow-ups with product owners, it became obvious that automation and intelligent workflow design in onboarding can fundamentally change how quickly and smoothly these platforms move merchants from legacy processors.

With the right approach, there’s a clear path to both operational efficiency and higher satisfaction scores.

Money 20/20 spotlighted how solving this onboarding problem at scale can unlock value for all players in the ecosystem: platforms, merchants, partners, and investors alike. The push to improve this area isn’t simply incremental, it’s a potential game-changer that can drive widespread adoption and deepen relationships up and down the payments stack.

Integrations & Customization: Less Hype, Real Value

Another ongoing trend is the demand for seamless integrations. While custom integrations will always be necessary as platforms expand into new markets and verticals, the most transformative wins right now are being driven by smarter onboarding flows rather than integration alone. This subtle shift in focus stood out during founder roundtables and in talks with product and engineering leaders at the show.

From Investor Conversations to Founders’ Insights

Money 20/20 isn’t just a gathering of industry titans, it’s also an unmatched opportunity for genuine dialogue. From roundtables organized by leading venture firms to lively breakfasts and serendipitous hallway chats, the event delivered a wealth of perspective on the challenges, opportunities, and emerging trends in fintech innovation. High-caliber investor interest and the ability to connect with other founders proved invaluable for exchanging ideas on customer acquisition, funding, and international go-to-market strategies.

Wrapping Up: Momentum, and Opportunity

Beyond the sessions and networking, the diversity of experiences—from PR shoots to offsite breakfasts, made Money 20/20 Las Vegas a powerhouse for inspiration and action. The conference underscored the urgency and opportunity in reimagining fintech onboarding, confirmed market appetite for automated solutions, and fostered connections that will fuel meaningful change in the months ahead.

As LinkToAny continues to push the boundaries of onboarding automation and merchant migration, the event reaffirmed our commitment to solving these challenges at scale and collaborating with industry leaders driving the next wave of fintech innovation.

Whether you’re a fintech founder, investor, or payments innovator, the key takeaway from Money 20/20 is clear: the future will be shaped by those who simplify onboarding and migration, making it as seamless and scalable as the products themselves.

Building a startup isn’t a straight line. It’s a series of experiments, pivots, and bets—some that work, and some that teach you the hard way.

Over the last few years of building Link, I’ve learned that success isn’t just about having a great product. It’s about how you sell it, how you keep innovating, and how you choose to fund your journey.

Here are three lessons that have shaped the way I run Link and that might spark ideas for your own entrepreneurial path.

1. Sales and marketing: Find the most efficient path to market

As a tech entrepreneur, pushing the boundaries on product innovation is key. But it’s equally important to be nimble with sales and marketing.

When we started, we sold directly to merchants—retailers and restaurants. Selling and scaling into this segment is challenging due to its fragmentation. You either need deep venture capital pockets or an incredibly efficient way to reach them.

That efficiency came when we discovered a better route: selling through the tech platforms that already serve these merchants. Instead of building a large sales team, we made the platforms and their sales teams our customers. They, in turn, connect us to their merchants, our end users.

Once we validated this model with one point-of-sale system, one accounting platform, and so on, scaling became much faster. We now work with multiple platforms across retail and food, and their channels effectively serve as our sales force while LinkToAny delivers value for both the platform and the merchant.

Takeaway: Look for distribution channels where someone else already has the audience you want. It can be the difference between slow, expensive growth and fast, scalable traction.

2. Innovation: Keep research alive while serving your core

Every startup wrestles with the same challenge: how do you push into new ideas without losing focus on your bread and butter?

AI is the latest wave where this question comes up. LLMs and agent-centric models are everywhere in the conversation, but figuring out how to actually use them meaningfully is another matter.

At LinkToAny, accurate and dynamic mapping between systems is mission-critical. So we put two engineers into “lab mode” for months to hammer away at LLM capabilities. Eventually, they cracked it. When we demoed the solution to one of the largest point-of-sale and payment companies in North America, they immediately saw the value. We’re now taking it through the next stages of market rollout.

Takeaway: Even when it’s hard to justify in the short term, consistent R&D pays off. Your prospects and customers are exploring these same technologies—if you’re not, you risk becoming irrelevant.

3. Funding: Take only what you need; keep control where it counts

“How much should I raise?” is a question every founder faces. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s not just about the number—it’s about control and flexibility.

It’s tempting to think you need to raise $50M or more to have a shot at a billion-dollar exit. But in many cases, you might only need $7M to reach profitability and still execute well beyond that. That can often be done with angels and smaller funds, without giving up too much board control or company rights.

Why does this matter? Markets fluctuate, obstacles arise, and founders require the ability to make flexible decisions. Once you give that away, it’s difficult to get it back.

Takeaway: Raise in smaller chunks, choose your investors carefully, and keep the door open for future funding by nurturing long-term relationships.